An Expert Review of SeekOut's Talent Sourcing Solution - 2023

With an incredibly wide-reaching search function, Seekout can streamline and accelerate your hiring efforts, even for hard-to-find, industry-specific talent. Their tool sources from an ever-growing list of over 780M candidates, while leveraging their contributions to GitHub, academic papers, conferences, and more.

As one of the longest-standing candidate sourcing tools, Seekout helps organizations search for talent the way they want, leveraging the latest in AI and open web data to give — in the words of one customer — “more search capability than LinkedIn.”

Whether you use PowerFilters, build customized Boolean searches, or use the AI Robot, Seekout can search over 500 million detailed and up-to-date candidate profiles, sorting them based on education, experience, skills, and more. Plus, with their free Chrome extension, you can bring the power of Seekout wherever you search for talent to source, organize, enrich, and export candidate profiles.

As one of the experts we talked to in order to put together this review told us, some of the vendors in the candidate sourcing space are tech in the front end, people in the back end. You can set up certain parameters and perform searches, but behind the scenes it’s people doing the work. SeekOut, on the other hand, is able to source candidates in seconds because it’s all tech-powered.

Another notable thing about SeekOut is that they rely on several external databases, as well as your own. Hence, the tool is able to present you with the best-possible candidates for a job while scouring externally and internally.

It doesn’t stop there. A thing we like is not only the multi-platform sourcing but how SeekOut’s tech interacts with all this data to provide a 360-degree view of each candidate. For example, when looking at GitHub profiles, it actually reviews their code contributions and gives them a Coder Score within their profile.

Similarly, their tool can review over 96 million academic papers, as well as patents, and list candidates. From this data, it’s able to categorize candidates based on areas of expertise and show you the relevant profiles.

Lastly, while most of their plans are custom-priced, including their blind hiring module and advanced filtering capabilities, they do offer a free Chrome extension. This is called SeekOut Sourcing Assistant. This part of SeekOut’s offering can extract rich information directly from the same databases as the paid tool and allow you to organize, enrich and export candidate profiles.

While SeekOut is one of the best talent intelligence tools out there, it most certainly needs to work along an ATS. For instance, you can’t perform interviews, hire, or onboard employees within the platform. Hence, teams looking for a one-stop-shop for their recruiting needs would need to find a more comprehensive tool, although they might be sacrificing when it comes to candidate search quality and ease.

SeekOut is used by enterprise customers such as VMware, Salesforce, Merck, UiPath, and Anaplan.

• Customizable Boolean strings: You can set parameters for these searches within the platform, or even have SeekOut’s customer success team assist you with building them. This ensures that you’ll get candidate search results that are more likely to be excellent fits.
• ‍Clone searches: This feature is quite particular, as it allows you to find candidates similar to a given profile. If you ever had that feeling of finding a candidate that was perfect, safe for one deal-breaking detail, you’d want to check this out.

The SeekOut platform can also handle:

• Unified candidate profiles
• AI search
• Diversity hiring
• Talent analytics
• Candidate engagement
• Candidate clearance

SeekOut integrates with other recruiting and HR tools like Avature, Beamery, Bullhorn, Greenhouse, Lever, SmartRecruiters, Gem, Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, Jobvite, Ashby, and many more.

Seekout has a few different plans:

• Premium: Access to 441M+ candidates, diversity sourcing and hiring tools, people insights, contact info for 500 candidates per month and exporting of 5,000 profiles per month.
• Premium Tech: All of Premium, plus specific tools for sourcing tech talent. These include Coder Score rankings, GitHub search tool, direct access to candidate's code, and tailored insights.‍
• SeekOut Expert: Designed specifically for Engineering and Life Sciences hiring.

The actual pricing of SeekOut’s plans and services isn’t disclosed on their website. You would have to contact their sales team for a custom price quote.

Seekout also provides a free Chrome extension for sourcing, SeekOut Sourcing Assistant. It’s free to use but with a limit of getting verified social links and emails for 10 candidates per month.

Seekout has segmented pricing plans for different industries. While there is a general plan for most businesses, Tech, Engineering, and Life Sciences hiring managers get the most functionality from Seekout. The tool can be used by companies with large in-house recruiting teams as well as small agencies looking for a user-friendly tool to reach a diverse pool of talent.

SeekOut’s implementation process will vary depending on the type of plan you choose and the scope of your project. What is certain is that they work with implementation consultants. Before and after you sign up for the tool, your team would work closely with such a consultant in order to assure a good execution and adoption of the tool.

SeekOut has a knowledge base with articles for customers to self-serve. Customers can also contact SeekOut's support team if further help is needed. For instance, if you find a candidate profile with wrong contact information, it’s very straightforward to reach out and let them know so they can fix it.

SeekOut was founded by Anoop Gupta (current CEO) and Aravind Bala (present CTO). Their vision has always been to provide companies with a holistic view of both internal employees and external talent when it comes to finding the right candidates. The company has experienced tremendous growth since their inception and noteworthy adoption in the US, Canada, and Europe.